In Class Assignment Week 5- Unfair Advertising Practices

Unfair advertising practices are advertisements that aren't adjusted correctly for different niche audiences with different demographics. One type of a special audience that needs advertising directly focused on their niche is children. Children need this special type of advertising because they are not matured and have a lack of maturation; maturation is predicated on knowing what something is and having experienced that thing. "Think of maturation as a series of gates along the path to higher media literacy" (Media Literacy 57). Once one reaches a more developed level of maturation, they are able to break down and process media in a more effective and coherant manner, once they have reached a higher level of maturation they will also have experienced more and be able to relate to what they are seeing in the media. An unfair advertising practice for this niche audience would be something about a serious relationship, they are not going to relate to the relationship that is occuring in the commercial, they are going to want to see a commercial that is appropriate and applies to their age group, it needs to be something relateable. This special audience needs to be protected from harmful or confusing advertising. Children need to be able to see the difference between program content and commercial content. "Young children are fuzzy about the difference between program content and communication content" (Media Literacy 62). Now there are new laws in place that require this separation to occur, childrens minds can be clouded very easily with the programming they see on television. Now there is a clear line where advertising practices can become unfair and unjust toward certain special niche audiences.

Potter, W. James. Media Literacy. 4th ed. Minneapolis: Sage Publications, Inc, 2007. Print.

Blog Asssignment Week 5- The Corporation

After watching the movie, The Corporation, it really changed my perspective on big companies, i knew corporations were overpowering but i was not aware of that they are some of the most dominating institutions of our time. Most corporations main concerns are with making as much money as possible, and making a profit off of other people even if it means exploiting them. These corporations are names we hear daily, such as Exxon, General Electric, Wal-Mart, Mitsubishi and many others, these companies are portrayed as ruthless bad guys who will stop at no cost.

People need to be able to create their own opinions on whether they are going to invest their time or spend money on these corporations. In the section of the video called perception management, communications organizations provide these large corporations with ways to create a good image for themselves and not make them look like the monsters that they are. These organizations use propaganda to make us think in a certain way. But if people have a proactive perspective on the media, they won't confine to the norm and willingly donate their money to these corporations. "We need to be proactive-rather than reactive-in understanding how the media affect us" (Media Literacy 73). This means we are able to make our own choices on whether we want to buy that product or support all the things that the company supports. The advertisements these companies use can be deceiving, for example the pfizer commercial from the video, it made it seem like the company was peaceful, calm and like they were doing a good thing. But in reality this company has committed fraud multiple times.

These companies have complete disregard for the well being of other humans, in one portion of the video called "Are Corporations Psychopathic?" they show case how corporations seem to actually be psychopathic, it seems almost true, they do not feel guilt, they fail to conform to the social norms with respect to lawful behaviors and they have an incapacity to maintain relationships. "The media are constantly influencing how we think feel and act" (Media Literacy 74). If we constantly let the media without us choosing to make our own decisions, these corporations will take a hold over us as a people and be a large monopoly that cannot be stopped. We are constantly experiencing process effects from our exposure to media messages, these messages affect our emotional and physical states of being, when we are able to make our own decisions about what we see on the media, we will be able to make the decision of whether we want to believe these decorated and over-exaggerated commercials about corporations.

Potter, W. James. Media Literacy. 4th ed. Minneapolis: Sage Publications, Inc, 2007. Print.

Cool Picture- In class assignment

For my picture of cool, i decided to use my Mac laptop. I wasn't able to go out this weekend because i was sick, so i thought of an object i have at school that i treasure the most and is the coolest to me and used a picture of it. I decided to use my Mac because in my opinion it is one of the coolest gadgets i own. I had been saving up to get mac the second i started applying to colleges, my mom purchased a desktop mac for her work, and i couldn't stay away from it when I was at home. That was when i made the executive decision that when i went away to college i wanted to get a Mac and not a PC.

A mac is a perfect example of a 'cool' that is constantly changing. The apple company has been developing and creating a name for themselves for over a decade. Now they have products like my slender, sleek, virus free macbook that comes with a free ipod touch if you are purchasing your macbook for college. What young adult can resist that deal?

The Mac commercials on television come in all different forms and are aesthetically pleasing to the consumers, like me. The ipod touch commercials play new age techno music that attract many different niche audiences, especially my niche, young adults. Everyone wants to be the guy dancing around with the earbuds in his ear playing techno music. This advertisment makes you want to go out and buy one for yourself. The macintosh insignia, the apple, also makes an eye-catching statement. If you see someone with an apple computer, you know it is high tech and has all the new up to date applications. In 2010 the mac laptop is the one of the coolest gadgets to have.

Press Kit for Look Look-In class assignment

After reading the "Look-Look" press kit, I found myself very interested in what the Look-Look companies mission is. It is a huge corporation that benefits marketers and advertisers world wide. This company has over 35,000 employees who just research what is trendy and in the mainstream media at this very moment. They are constantly updating new and current information onto their website. Their research team of 35,000 people is made up of clients, business people, young adults, photojournalists, respondents, sociologists and more. All of these people each play an important role in achieving the goal of the Look-Look corporation, which is to find out what is trendy now and how they can help marketers and advertising companies reach out to their niches of their individual products. Look-Look has a specific way of finding what is trendy. Since the concept of a 'mass audience' is no longer a valid way of addressing advertising, Look-look searches for the 'minor minorities' in society. "Over the years, audience segmentation schemes have become more complex in an effort to generate more precise grouping" (Media Literacy 45). This is the goal of Look-Look is to look for these minority niches that are not on the radar of the widespread media groups and advertisers. After they research and find these specific niches, they pay specific attention to that certain demographic.

The Look-Look company has a series of steps that they follow when trying to find out what the hot topics are right now. The Look Look network does not just do a surface level scan of these niches, they ask young adults what is cool right now and they try to get to know them and interact with them on a more personal level, not just as a selling point for marketing or advertising. They strive to get a very in depth analysis of what these teens are like and what their needs and desires are. Look-Look uses a variety of ways to gather and collect their research, they use surveys, field reports as well as photo research to get to the heart of what is going on in the world of young adults. These ways of gathering information help marketers know what these kids existing needs and interests are so they can attend to them. Look Look strays away from what is already mainstream, they investigate deeper and look toward what all types of audience niches are into, not just what is main stream. They want to find out what the minority is interested in, and then they give their information, statistics and findings to companies and organizations that advertise for the majority. Once the information that look-look finds is handed off to their clients, they use the information to direct their advertisements towards the correct niches, attract audiences and assists with cross-media and cross-vehicle promotion. "Media programmers must find potential members of their audience in other audiences so the programmers can promote the new messages and thus attract people in the audiences that they are trying to construct" (Media Literacy 50). This is exactly what Look-Look is trying to provide for these companies, a new and unique way to get their advertising across to their niche audiences.

As i looked at all the clients that the look look network has, it was very interesting to see all the different demographics that they provide information for. For example, Kellogg's cereal and Maybelline make-up. Kellogg's cereal is usually marketed to the niche of younger children, they have mascots that appeal to little kids like Tony the Tiger, the mascot for frosted flakes. Maybelline is marketed to women in their late teens to late twenties. Their research spans over a mass audience, but then separated into these smaller majority of categories. Look-Looks main goal is to look past what was trendy and hot yesterday, and find the minority today and turn that into an advertising trend. " The mass media segment the general population into marketing niches..." (Media Literacy 42). This is the exact goal of the Look Look company, to find those small niches; research and examine them and then give their findings to the marketers to create advertisements that will be directed at these particular niches.

Potter, W. James. Media Literacy. 4th ed. Minneapolis: Sage Publications, Inc, 2007. Print.

Design a Poster- Blog Assignment #3

Since Mass Audience is no longer a valid concept, I composed this ad about "Scoring a Slammin Bod" because it appeals to my 'Niche'. The demographic of my niche is a younger, late teenage female, who is a student in either high school or college. The media message my ad sends out is a guide to find a slamming body, and when your young and in college, there is no better time to achieve the best body that you can. It gives tips on how to stay healthy, eat right, exercise properly and with confidence.

It is very true that this ad will only attract a certain kind of audience, it has bright perky colors, very bold statements and words describing how you will feel when you do and achieve the steps to having a slamming body. "Although we have a wide variety of media and messages available to us, we usually select a small subset of them that tend to serve our needs best." (Media Literacy 49). This ad is very broad, it can attract a wide variety of ages, mostly younger but still a concentrated niche or audience of younger women. This ad does fit my needs best, it is something i desire to achieve and many other young women do as well. I thought the idea i chose would be compelling as well because it doesn't apply to social or economic segmentation, it isn't expensive and anyone can try any of these ideas risk free. This advertisement is catchy and innovative, anyone in the audience of my niche would definitely not pass by this ad.

Potter, W. James. Media Literacy. 4th ed. Minneapolis: Sage Publications, Inc, 2007. Print.

Superbowl Commercial 2/10/10- In class assignment

This SuperBowl commercial connected is with mass audiences because it is appealing to a wide variety of people, not just one niche. It is anonymous because the commercial dealt with relationships and nearly everyone has some type of relationship with another person. All people can relate to why the little boy slapped his mothers date, he was protecting and watching out for her, he also was protecting his Doritos, so the commercial was insinuating that he had a certain affection or relationship with the Doritos as well.

In my opinion this is directed to the marketing niche of younger people. The couple in the commercial was young, as was the little boy. The little boy was standing up for himself in the commercial as well as if he was advocating how strongly he felt about his mom and his Doritos. This marketing technique makes the product seem more hip and likable to younger kids. The demographic of this commercial definitely applies males as well as females, a younger age group, and people of an average income. The boy wanted the Doritos to himself, so if he wanted them that bad they must be delicious, that is definitely one of the selling points of the ad.

The psychographic segmentation was new age and current, the story line of the commercial takes place in present day 2010, especially with the little boy hitting the boyfriend, it shows the way children act in this era, with the boy slapping the boyfriend and not the boyfriend slapping the little boy. I was not expecting the boy to slap his mothers boyfriend, it was very unexpected to the audience, it made me want to rewind and replay that moment. This commercial attracted and appealed to the interest of many types of audiences.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYyfbeRVM4E

Target Commercial Jingle- IN CLASS ASSIGNMENT

This commercial doesn't necessarily have a jingle, but it was the song playing that stuck in my head. The song played in the 2008 and 2009 target commercials was Hello Goodbye By the Beetles. Although i knew the song was sung by the beetles and that was where i originally heard it, after i kept repeatedly hearing it on the Target commercials I would associate Hello Goodbye not with Target but with the beetles. It was also interesting seeing the Target commercial from the early 1980's. They didn't play hello goodbye but they had another song that was familiar to me. The commercial also showed the red target sign at the end, although the songs were different i think the people who created the advertisement had the same idea in mind. This Target commercial is also relevant to my life because I shop there often and I go there whenever I see a sale on a commercial. One time that Target particularly affected my life was this past summer when i was shopping for accessories for my dorm room with my mom. My mom is unable to walk for long periods of time so she needed to use one of the electric wheelchairs in target with the cart attached to it and we were both dying laughing because she knocked down every display she drove by, its just one of those memories that you will never forget.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4iJC5gdkeA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2ui19zu5lw

Blog Assignment 2- Pick an advertisment and its correlation to pop culture

The advertisement I chose is from the Abercrombie and Fitch clothing line. This advertisement is enticing to anyone who looks at it, there is a half naked man on it, who isn't going to stop and stare? This ad is directed mostly at younger people, from later elementary school to high school aged. What young boy doesn't want to look as buff and handsome as that man does in the abercrombie clothing and what girl doesn't want to be with the strapping young man in the photo?

In order to understand and comprehend this advertisement you need to be able to understand the deeper message of the product they are trying to market. This advertisement displays the different aspects of how knowledge structures are necessary to find information and evaluate this advertisement effectively. Social information is "composed of techniques that people learn from observing social interactions" (Media Literacy 14). Concerning the Abercrombie advertisement, young people are attracted to it because of the appeal that the 'sexy body' that everyone should have. The commercial is basically saying, if you wear Abercrombie, you will be as hot as this guy or you can be with this hot guy. Once we have built up our knowledge structures, it brings us a step closer to being a media literate person.

The idea of being a media literate person applies to this advertisement as well as understanding any advertisement. The people who created this advertisement wanted the six pack of abs to grab an onlookers attention; once someone decides they want to be like that guy on the ad or be with that guy, it raises the chance that they will purchase the clothing from that store. Since Abercrombie and Fitch is percieved as cool by a large percentage of tweens, then all the other tweens will want to have A&F clothing as well. This idea applies to being a media literate person because young teens are not maturated fully and don't have the experiences to fully assess this brand and come to the realization that this brand may seem to be make you look hot from the photo, but wearing the clothing may not necessarily make you a 'cool' person.

http://images2.layoutsparks.com/1/237016/abercrombie-and-fitch-guy-31000.jpg

Potter, W. James. Media Literacy. 4th ed. Minneapolis: Sage Publications, Inc, 2007. Print.

Blog Assignment #1-Who Owns the Media

Who owns the media? there are many different answers to this question, of course we as a people own the media, and we have ownership over the Internet, but there are also many large corporations that own the media, after I looked at The Media Channels Ownership Chart, it was interesting to see the major companies that run the mass media system. These six large corporations: Time Warner, Viacom, Walt Disney, News Corporation, Bertelsmann, Vivendi Universal and Time Warner. All of these names all ring a bell, but I never thought of them as the corporations that run our mass media production today.


For example The Walt Disney Corporation owns 29 Radio stations, 10 major news stations (ABC Television & Radio), the corporation also owns almost all of the major Film Producing companies such as Miramax, Touchstone, Buena Vista and others as well. These companies on the media ownership chart cover mostly television, radio, book publishing as well as large film companies. All the companies I assumed were large entities of their own, such as ABC are actually owned by these large corporations, so small public television stations are owned by larger companies with more power. Although these are some of the biggest corporations that run the mass media today, we as a people have a choice of what kind of media we choose to watch and listen too.


Internet is one of type of media that is not covered by these companies, the Internet it is a free world, there is no controlling what you can look at, what information is available and what information you can make available. When we use the Internet, it is almost automatic to us what websites we go to and what information we wish to see. This concept is called automaticity; "automaticity is a state where our minds operate without any conscious effort from us" (Media literacy 7). When one accesses their favorite sites on the Internet, it is almost an automatic action, like going to facebook or aol. These automatic routines are ingrained in our head so we get to choose what media we want to watch and enjoy.


In the textbook "Media Literacy", chapter one addresses the fact that we live in a media saturated world. This means we are constantly surrounded by all different kinds of media, television, commercials, advertisements, Internet and radio. It is our job to choose and filter what kind of media we choose to follow or listen to. One of the most powerful media devices is the television. "Television is still by far the dominant medium at 275 minutes per day" (Media Literacy 5). This means that we as a people watch on average about 275 minutes of television a day. That is a lot of television, so each individual needs to stop their 'automatic pilot' of just watching TV and filter out the stations that they don't want to watch, they have to be selective. So going back to the idea about the Media and ownership chart and all the networks, one can be media literate and choose what networks they agree with and enjoy watching. Although there are advantages to just watching whatever station is on, "it helps us get through many great decisions without the effort" (Media Literacy 8). But once one can be media literate and understand and comprehend media in an effective way, their automatic pilot will not be on anymore and they will be creating and making their own decisions.

Potter, W. James. Media Literacy. 4th ed. Minneapolis: Sage Publications, Inc, 2007. Print.